Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

A blog by Daniel Huffman, cartographer, map critic, and lecturer in UW-Madison's Geography Department.

Andy Woodruff, cartographer

"Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits."

The book Making Maps 2nd edition by John Krygier and Denis Wood (published by Guilford Press) was written for the Do It Yorself (DIY) cartographer – the student, the new GIS user, the internet user – anyone who wants to make maps that work and look great.This blog highlights resources that supplement the Making Maps book and help you to make better maps. Like the Making Maps book, this blog also provides examples of creative and provocative maps and material on map making and understanding, culled from contemporary and historical sources.

"Bill Rankin is a historian and cartographer. His mapping activity is focused on reimagining everyday urban and territorial geographies as complex landscapes of statistics, law, and history. His maps have appeared in publications and exhibitions throughout the US and Europe, including articles in Perspecta, Harvard Design Magazine, and National Geographic and shows at Harvard University, Pratt Institute, the Cartographic Bienalle in Lausanne, the Triennalle di Milano, and the Toronto Images Festival; his maps also traveled for several years with ICI’s “Experimental Geographies” exhibit. His historical research is about the politics of cartography and navigation in the twentieth century. He teaches at Yale University, where he is an assistant professor of the history of science."

"Frank Jacobs loves maps, but finds most atlases too predictable. He collects and comments on all kinds of intriguing maps—real, fictional, and what-if ones—and has been writing the Strange Maps blog since 2006, first on WordPress and now for Big Think."

The American Geographical Society Library Digital Map Collection currently contains over 700 maps, ranging from early maps of Asia to historical maps of Wisconsin and Milwaukee, and other American cities, states, and national parks. The digital collection is under continuing development.

Online gallery of select maps from the British Library

The historical map collection has over 38,000 maps and images online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia, and Africa are also represented.

The Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress holds more than 4.5 million items, of which Map Collections represents only a small fraction, those that have been converted to digital form.
The focus of Map Collections is Americana and Cartographic Treasures of the Library of Congress. These images were created from maps and atlases and, in general, are restricted to items that are not covered by copyright protection.
Map Collections is organized according to seven major categories. Because a map will be assigned to only one category, unless it is part of more than one core collection, searching Map Collections at this level will provide the most complete results since the indexes for all categories are searched simultaneously.

The Harvard Map Collection is one of the oldest and largest collections of cartographic materials in the United States with over 500,000 items. Resources range from 16th century globes to modern maps and geographic information systems (GIS) layers. A selection of our materials has been digitally imaged and is offered both as true picture images and georeferenced copies.

Compiled by Tony Campbell, former map librarian for the British Library, this website features thousands of historic maps from the age of exploration to the 19th century, organized by world region.

The OldMapsOnline Portal is an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world.It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution.

The Map Library at the University of Texas-Austin has a significant number of digitized maps online. Most are in the public domain and are popular government documents from the 20th century.